How to measure inventive speed? A new patent activity assessment dimension

This study presents a methodology for the objective measurement of inventive speed as a quantitative characteristic of the effectiveness of the creative process in R&D. It is put forth as an additional approach to the established quantitative methods for measuring patent activity. The methodology determines the mean inventive range within a given dataset of patent publications. This is calculated by identifying the difference between a patent's priority date and that of the closest analogous invention. This allows the rate and frequency of updates to be established for the technical solutions created. A computer program was developed to automate the implementation of the method, which was then tested on a number of companies in the semiconductor industry. The analysis identified two companies that exhibited markedly disparate rates of invention, both in terms of upward and downward trends. The proposed methodology is fully automated and is not influenced by the quantitative characteristics of the data sets analysed, in contrast to previously known methods. It can serve as a supplementary tool for building patent landscapes, analysing the efficiency of R&D processes in companies or countries, as well as for studying the technological field's development cycle.